The first stork came to me the night we lost an hour to summer time. I woke up groggy, confused, my thoughts all gloopy as I mixed steel-cut oats with soy milk in a saucepan on low heat. In the dream, the sky was overcast, the air oversaturated with ozone, and the stork looked straight at me with its black eyes. Its beak was too red, like a candy apple, and opened wide to show sharp teeth. All day, the memory stayed superglued to me; even after using the overpriced blueberry body scrub I'd shoplifted, my skin felt clammy. But it was Sunday, so I tried to let it go and spent the rest of the day curled up on the sofa, half-listening to an audiobook about oceanic creatures and napping.

The next morning, I had to go to the office, a redbrick building downtown right next to a metro station. The windows were poorly insulated, so every few minutes you'd hear the hiss of a train arriving and the automatic doors wheezing open. It didn't quite blur into meditative white noise.

I worked at a newspaper, although I avoided the news. My job was to create the daily crossword and rebus puzzles. That day, I kept drafting clues like ADJUTANT and BABY BRINGER and LARGE MIGRATORY BIRD. The dream rattled around my skull but wouldn't take flight. I doodled some flowers and finally pushed the papers away to go make a cup of tea, which I drank in slow, scalding sips while looking out the window. The sky was a crisp blue freckled with fluffy clouds. A man in an ill-fitting suit rushed from the train and knocked into a pram. The pedestrian mother yelled after him. I couldn't make out her words, but saw her big gestures and imagined she called him a fucking cunt and then imagined her baby's first words would be an echo of that. Fucking cunt.

All my coworkers had journalism degrees and great connections. I had neither, just a knack for word games and an eidetic recollection of the thesaurus. On good days, I could bang out fifteen crosswords and still catch the early train home. On others, like this day, I'd lavish my time playing Tetris on the laptop and giving secretive head in the restroom. Everyone else was busy writing lengthy think pieces and cultural reviews. I flossed my teeth and went home.

That night, another stork visited me. Its eyes were black holes, too glossy, almost hypnotically so. It was eating my peonies. I knew I should go out there and scare it away, save my flowers, but I was more scared than the bird. I thought it might eat me. When I woke up, my duvet clung to me and my breath jolted behind my teeth, sourly laced with fear that I chased away with instant coffee. I took another shower, got through another day of work, finished that audiobook I'd started. The narrator's voice, underpinned with a strange eroticism, made me sleepy. She read the book with such intimacy it made me pliant and I thought of her breasts in my mouth. I drifted off and, yes, another fucking stork flew into my dream and pinioned me with its freaky gaze. It was much closer to me this time, perched on the corner of my bed. It tilted its head and flicked out its tongue, which was thin and bony, like a fillet knife. I woke up trembling the way I do when I come, and I was cold-sweating again. I thought I might need something stronger than coffee to get through the day, but then I thought of the audiobook narrator and imagined she'd be disappointed in me if I started drinking at 7:30. That's not even really day drinking, is it? It's something more embarrassing.

The next night was the same. And the next, storks in my garden and storks in my pantry, demolishing the popcorn kernels and red bags of chicken ramen, storks on the power line and storks on my mother's grave and storks in my bed, dark eyes and teeth and tongue. Red, red beaks. I figured this was just my life now. I thought briefly of seeing a doctor, but what would the point be? What could she do about these nightly avian hauntings? Can you medicate against omens? If I'd wanted to, I probably could've reached the same psychoanalytic conclusions as she would, but I didn't want to. I just wanted them to leave my sleep alone.

During the twenty-eighth night, a hoarse scream stagnated in my throat and I woke up because I couldn't breathe around it. Moonlight damasked my whitewashed bedroom walls and I zombied through the hallway and into the living room where I slid the patio door into its fitting. There was something on the lawn, next to the peony bed, too big. Bigger than it should be. The moon spotlighted it. I stepped closer, breathed in the dizzying smell of decay. Dead, the stork's beady eye stared right through me. My stomach churned like a corkscrew.

I felt something drip slowly from me. I didn't want to look down my body, scared of what I'd see. I didn't want to look at the stork either, but it was looking at me and all I could do was look back.


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